The Galeria Fortes Vilaça has great pleasure in presenting new works by Janaina Tschäpe. Included are five large-scale watercolors, six poster-paint pictures on paper, and a series of eighteen Polaroid images. This exhibition reveals a new side of Janaina's production to the Brazilian public. Known for her photography and video installations, the artist is now showing herself to be a highly talented painter as well, with a unique repertoire among that of her contemporaries.
In the large watercolors Tschäpe flirts with abstraction and the landscape, and she achieves a delicate balance between gesture – with wide, confident and firm brush-strokes – and detail, in forms that unfold and subdivide into ever-smaller parts. Among these works, Until the morning, 2006 is notable for its liquid scenery in which trees dissipate into the blueness. Another striking element is the decomposition of the colors, through the use of a vast spectrum of tones of green, yellow, lilac; colors which seem to be pulverized into the paper.
The six poster paintings explore surface and composition close-up, as if the artist had zoomed in the lenses used for the watercolor landscapes so as to discover a microscopic universe of solid colors and gentle and sensual geometry. These are images inspired by nature, species of plants and flowers invented in the name of aesthetic interest.
The Polaroids are photomontages in which different kinds of creatures appear from among the greenery, or sprout from trees like fruit. These images require several stages of work. Firstly, the characters are photographed wearing costumes made by Tschäpe. These are then enlarged, and the figures are cut out and re-located in the nature sets built in the artist's studio, so as to be photographed again on Polaroid.
In addition to the exhibition at Fortes Vilaça, Tschäpe is also holding a large exhibition at the Paço das Artes with video installations and photographs from the nineties and the year 2000. The Paço will publish a catalogue to accompany the exhibition.
